


Natural

by Pemm



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Gen, There Is A Season
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-01 23:52:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2792243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pemm/pseuds/Pemm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Boys grow like weeds. Two years shot by, and Scout learned how to fight, and to run, and to combine those things. He learned strategy, prediction, doubling back, how to feint and how to dodge. He was a natural.</p><p>The one thing he did not learn was control.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Natural

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mls-classics](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=mls-classics).



> My TF2 Secret Santa fic for dear [mls-classics!](http://mls-classics.tumblr.com/) The prompt was "dark Scout."
> 
>  
> 
> **Part of the _[There Is A Season](http://archiveofourown.org/series/60682)_ canon, taking place between the events of _Cryoablation_ and _Hold Your Fire._**

Scout was fourteen when he got into his first proper fight. A  _real_ one, the kind he could tell stories about, like his brothers. Or that had been what he’d thought, going in with a feral grin and bat swinging.

Scout had never gotten properly pummelled before, either. He’d come away from it with his nose broken, two black eyes, and one ear nearly twisted off. Tobias and Roger told him he’d gotten off easy. It hadn’t felt easy. He went home crying to his mother, who had fussed and scolded and soothed him, child that he was, and then grounded him for nearly a month. He was too young for this, she said.

Boys grow like weeds. Two years shot by, and Scout learned how to fight, and to run, and to combine those things. He learned strategy, prediction, doubling back, how to feint and how to dodge. He was a natural.

The one thing he did not learn was control.

A cold spring Saturday, a bad neighborhood, a dark alley. Someone was screaming. That was weird. The screaming had stopped about a minute or two ago and usually it didn’t start back up again once Scout got going, when the bat _THUD_ started making _THUD_ wet, unpleasant _THUD_ sounds. He didn’t realize it was someone else doing it until it was right in his ear, and he whipped the bat around at the new attacker without even blinking.

A sharp cuss and a leap backwards only just got Tobias out of the way of the swing. Scout stared at him stupidly, and his brother took the opportunity to wrap his hands around the bat. Tobias’s grip was good, but he nearly lost hold when his hands slipped along the bright red blood that coated it. He grit his teeth, knuckles whitening as his hands tightened, and Scout flinched when he snarled. “What the _fuck_ d’you think you’re doin’?!”

Scout’s senses came back to him. He scowled, trying to pull his bat back. “What’re you, the police, I’m teachin’ him a damn lesson is what I’m doin’—”

With a heave Tobias ripped the bat right out of his hands. He was only two years Scout's elder, eighteen to his sixteen, but he was taller and bigger and impossible to stop when he was angry. And he could yell. Boy, could he. “You’re _killin’ him_! You stupid shithead, I watched you whalin’ on him a good minute after he went down!”

He jabbed the bat at the bloody heap lying sprawled over the burst trash bags. Scout followed it with his eyes. “… He wasn’t playin’ fair anyway,” he muttered. “He got me with my back to the wall an’ then he pulled a friggin’ knife on me, what’m I s’posed to do, let him gut me?”

“No, but you don’t fuckin’ keep beatin’ him once he ain’t fightin’ back no more! That ain’t how we goddamn do things! What were you gonna do, were you gonna kill him?” Tobias hesitated, looking at the body. “Christ— _did_ you kill him?”

“I didn’t kill him!” Scout said, affronted, but he got the hell out of the way when Tobias shoved past him to crouch and fumble at the guy’s wrist. He was perfectly still for a second, and then spat a snarl of a cuss as he reached to press his fingers to the lump’s neck instead. Scout’s head had started pounding. “I—I didn’t kill him, I couldn’t kill nobody, c’mon, Toby, you know me I wouldn’t kill nobody, he’s playin’—”

“He wasn’t gonna be playing long the way you were goin‘,“ Tobias snapped, pushing himself back up and wiping his hand off on Scout’s shirt. There was already blood on it anyway. ”Fuck. Okay. He ain’t dead yet. We’re gonna go find a pay phone an’ call this guy some help an’ then we’re runnin’.”

“But—”

Tobias looked at him. His face was a rigid black mask. “But _what_?”

“… Nothin’,” Scout mumbled, and let Tobias pull him out of the alley.

 

* * *

 

A hot summer Tuesday, a tucked-away corner of the Frontier field, an abandoned laneway. The howls and shouts of the BLU team are far, far ahead of him, and Scout hasn’t had a damn kill all day. He stalks out of respawn, hears the barking of the Administrator that tells him BLU’s gained enough territory to respawn further up, and spends twenty seconds just cussing.

There’s no teleporter in sight, so he breaks into a sprint to catch up. He doesn’t make it twenty yards before a flash of blue catches the corner of his eye, and when he stops he sees her: Pyro, fumbling with one of the ammo reserves cached behind a crumbling boulder.

Scout glances behind him, then ahead. No one.

Pyro doesn’t even notice him until his bat cracks into the side of her head.

She lurches sideways without so much as a sound, hitting one of the massive cliff walls practically face first. Scout stops, watches. A few seconds pass before she stirs and groans, shaking herself, reaching for her shotgun. She doesn’t get the chance. When Scout grabs her by the collar and throws her to the ground she yelps, and it turns into a shout of pain when he slams his cleat down on her stomach.

He can tell the exact moment she realizes who’s attacked her. She stops struggling, and Scout doesn’t fight the vicious grin that wrestles its way onto his face. “Well, well, well, what d’we got here?”

She starts to say something. He grinds his heel into her stomach and she shuts up, scrabbling for his leg. She never gets there. He shoots her point-blank in the chest.

Her agonized gurgles are nice enough to listen to while they last, but when she goes limp Scout finds that something feels wrong. He kicks the body and all that happens is more blood stains the desert dirt. It doesn’t feel as good as he thought it would.

He puts it out of his mind as he turns and takes off to catch up with the fighting, hoping that the hollow feeling in his chest will go away on its own.

 

* * *

 

Scout never found out if the guy they’d left in the alley made it or not. He never saw him again, but neither did he hear anything about anyone from the neighborhood getting beaten to death. So there was that.

With enough wheedling and begging, he got Tobias to promise not to tell anyone. He apologized up and down, anything Tobias wanted so long as he kept it to himself. Especially kept it from their mother. “Fine, alright,” Tobias said in the end through grit teeth. “But you damn well watch your ass, you got me, no more of this berserk crap. Our ma didn’t raise no killers. I don’t care that Liam went off t’the army, he’ll be back, he ain’t no murderer an’ neither are you. Got it?”

“I know, I ain’t, Toby, cripes, it was an accident. I ain’t gonna do it again.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Another year went by. It was two days after Scout’s seventeenth birthday that Teddy Mason came waltzing up past where Scout was sprawled out on the apartment stoop and tossing his favorite baseball between his hands idly. Teddy looked smug as the cat that got the canary, which was pretty standard. Scout tried to ignore him—he’d never liked the guy, didn’t like his greaser getup or his gang jacket or the way he treated his girlfriend Nora Berluti. Nora was a sweet gal, a little silly maybe, but Scout’s sister had always spoken well of her. Said she hadn’t grown up in the greatest family. She deserved better than someone like Teddy Mason, anyway.

Later Scout would guess that was probably what started it, really. It was stupid. Nora wasn’t even there, and it wasn’t like Scout was sweet on her or anything even, just his ma had brought her boys up to be gentlemen to all women, and listening to Teddy standing there bragging about the crap way he treated his girlfriend made Scout’s skin crawl. The bastard wouldn’t take a hint to scram when Scout told him to, either. It wasn’t until Teddy started getting into the gory details that Scout’s firecracker temper went off.

For years, the Owens’ boys’ pitch speed record had been an even 84 mph, set by Sidney when he was nineteen. Scout had broken it two months ago. Easy as breathing. Coach had called him a natural. His ball slammed into Teddy’s face at 92 mph from ten feet away. It cracked him right in his damn stupid greaser shades, threw his head back so fast it made a snapping sound, and the bastard went down shrieking and clawing at his eyes.

Scout didn’t realize it when he got up and crossed to where Teddy lay on the asphalt, but he had a pretty vivid memory of kicking and stomping the prone body, and yeah maybe he’d not bothered to change out of his cleats after practice that day, so what? Idiot was wearing leather, and it wasn’t like Scout was aiming for his face. But then Teddy got ahold of his pant leg and jerked him down to the ground, and all of a sudden they were rolling around on the fucking sidewalk together like animals, snarling, clawing.

At the time Scout had thought the pounding sound was just the blood in his ears, not feet tearing down the stoop, and the shouting was just meaningless noise. He didn’t have time to pay attention anyway, he was bleeding in five different places and Teddy had just whipped out a switchblade from somewhere and fuck, _fuck_ he had to get that away from him before it wound up in his neck, but he had Teddy on his back now. He had him on his back and he grabbed him by his goddamn filthy hair, hauled his head up, and _SMACK_ slammed it down to the pavement _SMACK_ again _SMACK_ and _SMACK_ again—

“ _Get off!_ ” something screamed right in his ear, and a pair of hands grabbed him by the upper arms, trying to drag him off. Scout dug in his heels, roared and raged, howling, and as soon as he realized Teddy had stopped moving he turned and launched himself right at whoever the new fucker was. He caught them around the waist, dropped them hard, and scrambled upright enough to deck them across the face before they could react. A pained yelp rewarded him, and then he’d gotten the bastard’s arm pinned with his knee and could use both hands and use them he did, beating away at the idiot’s face, already black and blue and red.

The thing under him had stopped fighting back already, now only trying to protect himself with his free arm. Scout snarled and dragged it away from his head.

Before he could really, truly register that it was Tobias’s face that stared up at him with wide, terrified eyes, something huge and heavy came down right between his shoulder blades. Scout lurched sideways, vision going white, and then it came down again with an impossible clang. Stunned, he could do nothing when Tobias drove his foot deep into his hip and kicked him off. Scout hit the asphalt, cursed, and looked up to see his own mother towering over him. The cast-iron frying pan shook in her hand.

At her feet, Tobias had scrambled backwards, away from him. As his vision cleared Scout watched him spit out a tooth with a sickening gagging sound, could see the bruises already puffing up his face, the blood streaming freely from his mouth and nose to soak his shirt.

The betrayed, shocked look on his face was bad enough, but Scout’s stomach didn’t drop until his brother spoke, in a high, wavering voice Scout had never heard before.

“What is _wrong with you?_ ”

 

* * *

 

The hollow feeling is still there when Scout corners Pyro behind a pile of crates three weeks later, under Standin’s gray sky. This time it isn’t by chance.

“Scout,” she says, muffled under the mask and he hates that he’s learned to understand her through it. She pulls her empty flamethrower up like a shield. The motion only worsens his temper. “Scout, come on, don’t—”

He brings his bat down on the hand she’s supporting the flamethrower’s neck with, and she yells in pain but doesn’t drop it. He bares his teeth and swings again and this time it’s too clumsy, too angry. His dented bat catches on something on the fucked-up bundle of scrap that is Pyro’s weapon, and with one powerful motion she rips it away from him. Both the bat and the flamethrower go flying; Pyro draws her axe in the same instant he grabs his pistol.

Everything’s very quiet.

Scout feels his lip curl, feels his hands tighten around the gun. He’s got a full twelve rounds, he hasn’t drawn it once all day. Pyro raises her axe, ready to swing. “Just _go away_ ,” she tells him, loud and clear.

He shoots her in the knee. While she’s on the ground, screaming in pain, he puts a bullet in her hip, too, and another through one lung. He has the clarity of mind to stop and yank her mask off before he puts the next two in her stomach.

Her sobbing is like music, but she’s lying on the wrong side, her scars to the ground. She’s already ugly, but everyone’s uglier when they cry, and her crying makes it worse in a way that sets his skin crawling and his mind pull up images of the way his sister looked when she found the still-breathing carcass of the rabbit her cat had caught. Scout had had to kill it, no one else was around and Annabelle sure wasn’t going to. He hadn’t enjoyed it, he didn’t like hurting animals, but he had worried about the sickening sort of thrill that had hit him when he finished the poor thing off.

That thrill is gone now, replaced by an ugly, seething hate. How dare she look so vulnerable, so pitiful? The satisfaction he craves is nowhere to be found as he watches her for a minute that feels far too long. The hollow feeling gnaws at him, and with a growl he kicks her in the gut. She chokes and curls into a ball just like the rabbit had, like the animal she is, blood and bile drooling down the side of her mouth.

It’s not enough. “Hey,” Scout says. “Hey, bitch. Look at me.” She does not. Scout snarls and drives his foot into her again. “Yo you hearin’ me? You gonna make me shoot you again? Look at me. I said _look at me_!”

Finally, slowly, she raises her gaze to him, eyes screwed up in pain. Scout levels the pistol at her face and pulls the trigger. Six times.

 

* * *

 

Teddy Mason went to the hospital. A concussion. A shard of glass dead-center through his right pupil. A coma, though he came out of it in the end, or so Scout would hear later.

Tobias went to the hospital, too, but walked out an hour later with some bandages and bruises and painkillers. Scout was left to tend to his own injuries, minor as they were. When his brother and mother returned home, Scout thought pretty hard about climbing out of the window, but stayed glued to the chair he’d curled up in after patching himself up. From where he sat he could just see them coming in through the hall.

He expected to get screamed at, or for Tobias to take a swing at him, or at least for _something_ to happen. But both of them just walked past him as they moved down the hall and into the kitchen. Scout stared at their backs until they disappeared, and when he looked away again he caught Roger and Sidney, sitting and playing cards on the couch nearby, giving him sideways glances. “What?” he croaked. They didn’t say anything either. Nobody said anything to him all night.

He slept on the couch, in the end, not wanting to deal with Tobias. Sharing a room with him suddenly felt like the stupidest thing he’d ever done. But it wasn’t like he had a choice about that—things were still cramped even with the four eldest boys and Annabelle gone, and they were still poor. So the couch it was. He slept like shit.

In the morning, Scout made the executive decision to play hooky. He left the house, screwed around in the arcade for an hour, and then darted back to grab his ball and bat. He didn’t remember he’d left it in his and Tobias’s room until after he got inside.

Shit. Well. Maybe Tobias had felt well enough to go to school anyway, even though Scout hadn’t seen him in the morning (when, again, no one had spoken to him). He found himself in front of their door sooner than he wanted, and stood there a whole thirty seconds before taking a deep breath and knocking.

Silence. His hand was on the knob when a muffled voice at last said, “What?”

Damn it all. Scout steeled himself and opened the door. “Uh … uh, hey.”

Tobias was flat on his back, on his bed, to the right of the door. From this angle Scout could only just see one side of his face, gone completely purple and green and black with bruises. His eye was swollen mostly shut. “… What?” he said again.

“Just, uh. I, I left somethin’ in here,” Scout said, not looking at him as he slipped in and crossed to his half of the room. “I’m just, I’m in and out, won’t be ten seconds.”

“Ma’ll tan your ass if she figures out you’re playin’ hooky again.”

“Yeah, well, I figure she’s gonna do that no matter what else I do,” Scout mumbled.

His ball—the same one he’d thrown at Teddy—was lying on top of their dresser. He grabbed it and turned to go, and in that moment Tobias heaved a huge sigh, one that sounded like it hurt. “Sit down, idiot.”

“Toby—”

“You knocked one’a my teeth out yesterday, I get to tell you what to do today.”

That got him to sit down, leaning uncomfortably back onto his bed. Tobias exhaled and looked back up at the ceiling.

For a minute or two the only noise was the distant streets of Boston.

Then Tobias said, “Ma was talkin’ about kickin’ you out.”

“… Oh.”

The way Scout’s heart lurched must have come out in his voice, because Tobias glanced over at him again. “I don’t think she’s gonna,” he said after a second or two. “But I—I mean, you scared the shit outta her. You scared the shit outta both of us, goddamn, man, what happened out there? I thought—I thought you were gonna kill Teddy. And then I thought you were gonna kill _me._ I was layin’ there thinkin’, just, ‘this is it, my own little brother’s gonna beat my face in, this is how I die.’”

“No! No I mean I wouldn’t ever—I mean, I … I dunno what happened,” Scout said, faltering. “… You said ma didn’t raise no killers.”

“Yeah, and Liam ain’t come back from the army yet,” Tobias said distantly. “I ain’t right about everything, I know you think I am sometimes but I ain’t. Were you gonna kill Teddy?”

It seemed to take a long time for Scout to do so much as shrug. “I’m, I dunno.” The words were sour on his tongue. Goddamn. If he couldn’t be honest with Tobias, who could he be honest with? “I just wanted to teach him a lesson. I mean, he was talkin’ about Nora again, y’know his girl Nora?”

“Aw, man, that girl with the braces? He treats her like shit, don’t he. I probably woulda jumped him too. Asshole,” he sighed, rolling over to better meet Scout’s eyes. He winced as he did. “But I mean, I mean like, you can’t kill the guy over it. You know? He’s a dickhead and he deserves gettin’ beat up but it’s, you were usin’ a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Y’don’t know when to stop, man. You keep goin’ and goin’ and I think you’d’a gone until it was too late to take it back. It’s gonna get you into some shit one day and there might not be nobody there to pull you off then. Yeah?”

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”

“’Course I’m right, I’m always right.”

“You _just_ friggin’ said—”

“Shut up,” Tobias said with a smile. “Look, it’s okay, it’s fine, I’m fine. Well I’m gonna _be_ fine.”

“Yeah,” Scout said again, glancing down. His knuckles were bruised and hurt and for a few seconds he focused on those. “I’m real sorry, Toby.”

“I know you are,” Tobias said. “You’re a good guy, you ain’t no Teddy Mason. You’re one’a us and that means you’re alright. But you got somethin’ up in that brain of yours goes nuts if you ain’t careful an’ you needta remember that. Alright?”

“Alright.”

“Cool. Now get the hell outta here, I’m sleepin’.”

 

* * *

 

It’s a black, rainy day in Thunder Mountain and Scout’s exhausted and bleeding and so is Pyro, but this time she’s the one with a shotgun pointed at his face. Her mask is still on. He imagines that she’s grinning under it, but when she reaches up and pulls it off her expression is as empty as the mask itself. Blood dribbles from her left ear and she can’t seem to put any weight on the leg Scout shot her in this time, but in his eagerness to get to her (to try and quell the still-there, still-growing hollowness), he had slipped in the damn mud. It was all the opening Pyro had needed to rebound and train her shotgun on him. Natural killer, Scout thinks.

“So, how many times have you done this?” she asks, something condescending in her voice. “I’ve had enough respawns where you coming toward me is the last thing I remember. What do you do, kick me to death? Torture me?” She narrows her eyes. “It has to take a while if I still remember it. You shouldn’t enjoy yourself for so long if you don’t want me to remember.”

Scout spits at her feet. “I don’t do anythin’ you don’t deserve.”

For a split second she is silent. Then she wheezes out a laugh, short and empty. “Right, okay, sure. I deserve to be tortured to death over and over because of an accident.”

“It wasn’t no goddamn accident you lying ugly—”

“It was an accident!” she barks. “I don’t know how many times I have to say that! I _never_ wanted to hurt him. I can’t remember much but I remember he was kind. He was kind to me. But maybe I’m remembering it wrong. Maybe he was more like you than I think. Would he be happy with what you’re doing, Scout, would he be _proud of you?_ ” She bares her teeth as she stares him down, fire-eyed. Her next words are almost a whisper. “Because if he would be then maybe it’s better that he’s dead.”

Scout isn’t sure of what happens next. He hears a scream that sounds a lot like himself and a shotgun boom and suddenly there’s a big hole in his side, but he’s got Pyro backed up against the wall, her hideous face inches from his and she’s strong but she’s not strong enough to push the shotgun away from her neck when he starts to choke her with it. Pretty soon she’s gasping, her struggles getting weaker, and just before he thinks she’s about to pass out he rips the gun away and grabs her by the hair.

It doesn’t take a lot of effort for him to pull her around to the side and shove her backwards into one of the piles of broken wood and rusting rail spikes that litter this base. She screams as they gore her and it hurts Scout’s ears. Only one pierces her deep enough to come out the other side, a narrow length of metal that sticks up through her gut, but there’s at least three more in her back. She’s not going to be talking anymore, and that’s almost good enough for Scout.

Before he knows what he’s doing he’s limped over to her. Her face is a mask of pain, she is silent but for her agonized gasps, and in the silence all Scout can feel is that hollowness, widening.

Eventually, he takes her hand. Slides the glove off, finds her scarred-up palm. He feels her freeze up, her eyes darting over to him in a silent, fearful question. Scout feels his face contort into something uglier than her.

He says, “My brother was a fucking _saint_ ,” and snaps one of her fingers back, easily twice as far as it should go. She writhes, crying out now, and more when he does it with the next finger, and the next, all punctuated with, “Don’t you _dare_ ,” _CRACK_ , “even _think_ ,” _CRACK_ “ _goddamn anything like that about him ever again—_ ”

She jerks her arm away from him at last, howling, and it catches him in the side with the hole in it, the one he’d forgotten about and now it comes back with a vengeance. He drops, and everything suddenly hurts a lot more than it did a minute ago, and wow that’s a, that’s a really, really big hole in his stomach, there.

He’s fallen at just the right angle to still have Pyro’s face in view, and she’s watching him still, panting shallowly. She has blue eyes, like him. He’s never noticed that before. From this angle he can’t see any of her scars at all.

Things start to get dark. In the fading lucidity of death, Scout can’t keep himself from thinking about what she said. About if his brother would have been proud.

He finds that even as he lays dying, the question hurts more than anything.


End file.
